iMurphy

I have found lots of extensions for Firefox (here), but my most recent is It’s All Text! It allows you to edit textarea’s in your favorite external text-editing program. I couldn’t get it to work, however! I read in the creator’s blog about how he seemed to solve the problem, but I still had to type the solution by hand into the preferences, as mentioned here. So, I’m reposting this solution in an effort to help the Mac community out. Blog on!

After hearing a great presentation on Ubuntu Linux, I thought, “Why haven’t I switched to Linux?” I have been very tempted, but there are a few major applications that keep me on my Mac. Finale is a big, one. (Though I hear you can run Finale on UNIX with WINE pretty well.) Aquisition is not the only Limewire/Gnutella client, but it is far and away the best. Blurb’s Booksmart self-publishing software isn’t available for Linux yet. Journler is still Mac OS X only; so is Delicious Library. But the biggest reason has to be iLife. There are other iPod managers like iTunes (but, of course, no store) and there may well be programs for Linux like the iOthers, but together and overall, the suite is smokin’!

Flock seems like a cool idea that is almost all there. The goal is to have a web-browser that combines all the savy, open-source coolness of Firefox, and a heap of Web 2.0 smarts (it automatically links up with your Flickr library and Delicious account). There are just a few kinks left in the system, but it’s at a stable beta release and will soon be enterprise ready. I wish they’d use Flock or Firefox at my work. It’s bad enough being trapped behind a lousy firewall, but it’s worse to have to use an outdated, incorrigible web-browser as I’m trying to re-layout my website. Ugh.

technorati tags:flock, web-browser, firefox, internet, web-2.0, open-source

Blogged with Flock

    Two programs have captured my heart lately. (I really like that they’re free, too!) SubEthaEdit is an extremely smart, collaborative text editor for groups. Cyberduck is a beautiful, aqualicious FTP client. They are both gorgeous, easy to use, and fantastic Mac OS X denizens. They never crash, do everything I want, and did I mention they don’t cost anything for non-commercial use? I found Cyberduck first, back when I was looking for an FTP program on VersionTracker. It was from within Cyberduck that I found out about SubEthaEdit.

    Cyberduck (developed by David Kocher) is very standards-compliant and allows the user to use an External Editor to tweak text files on a remote server almost as if it was on the local host. I say almost, but that’s only because I am on dialup, and so there is a visible delay time as the files are shuffled back and forth. For the rest of you lucky people out there in DSL or Broadband land, Cyberduck is transparent. In the Preferences pane, they have a list of programs compliant with the External Editor Protocol, which is where I found SubEthaEdit.

    The Coding Monkeys is apparently a group of German guys who make great Mac software. They’ve even won awards. Their one program to date is SubEthaEdit. They have designed it to color documents for you, in order to make various types of code easier to read. Then you can invite people to edit these documents with you, all the while monitoring what they do and chat with them. I haven’t had a need to collaborate with anyone using it, but I can see how it could become an indispensable tool. Their website is also gorgeous.

    So these two programs are able to talk to each other so well because they follow something called ODB or the External Editor Protocol. I can’t find out what ODB stands for any where. It is, apparently, something software developers can integrate into a program so that it plays well with others. BareBones, makers of BBEdit, seem to have started the concept and made an SDK. Marco Merzwaren also picked up the idea. Now there are lots of FTP and text editor programs that are compliant with the ODB External Editor Suite.

    What is missing is an ODB graphics editor, or even a plug-in for any pre-existing programs. I don’t have the programming chops to put two and two together anymore, but I wish somebody did. Is this kind of thing up anybody’s alley? To have HTML/PHP editing, visual CSS editing (a la CSSEdit) and graphics editing all tied into FTP would be a complete website editing suite. I think that because this protocol wasn’t sponsored by Apple that it may fall by the wayside. Darn.